The new search engine is run by former Google employees, and has already provided its first traffic to this very blog, see the domain entry in my stats which showed up earlier today:

New referrer entry from cuil.com

Along with a bigger index (they claim 120 billion pages) against Googles roughly 40 billion indexed pages, there are several other advantages to the new search engine. The results are not displayed in the classical Google fashion, but rather in several columns along with bigger text snippets than Google provides.

A search for my name shows up like so:

Cuil.com search for Lars Koudal

Another feature is the seemlingly semi-intelligent search engine, which attempts to group your search results and sort them into categories.

It is gonna be very interesting to see how Cuil.com is gonna do in competition with Google, especially from a SEO perspective. If they can generate enough traffic by ranking highly, the ballgame might change completely, so you need to optimize your sites for not only Google anymore, but Cuil.com as well.

Personally, I don’t know how well they are gonna do, the search results display very slowly, but it might be worth it for the better and nicer layout, and it might also just be an initial traffic spike.

Read the full press release.

a

Google under competetion? Meet Cuil.com

After clicking the upgrade button 6-7 times, and it still refused me to continue on, I decided to go digging on the Wordpress support forum, where several other people had the same problem.

None of the fixes worked though, so I decided to do a bit of digging myself.

Dissecting the upgrade.php file, I noticed a particular part:

<?php if ( get_option(’db_version’) == $wp_db_version ) : ?>

So, the upgrade.php file checks the data in the database to see if the version of the database is correct… Hmm, okay, let me dig up what it says in the database.

A quick visit via phpmyadmin discovered that the value “db_version” in the “wp_options” table was blank. That cant be right? So heading over to another blog which had successfully upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 without any problems, I saw that the value there was set to “8201″ …

I changed the value manually in the database, and now the blog works perfectly.

Please note, that I manually told Wordpress that I had updated the database correctly, so if that is not the case and the upgrade script did not finish running due to some sort of error, I could have broken the blog even more, please try this at your own risk!

a

Having trouble upgrading to Wordpress 2.6?

The site is now running stable, and it is a pleasure to work with the new version of Wordpress, I have yet to experience all the updates, but I am eager to play around with it.

a

Short downtime experienced - Wordpress 2.6

I read a recent post over at No Doubt Marketing, where they mention their top three tools. One of them is the Google Website Optimizer, which I have heard about before, and apparently signed up for once, since one of my old sites were listed under my experiments, but have not used in years.

The tool that Google provides free of charge is simple, but very powerful. It enables you to test which design and sales text that works the best.

You start out by defining your start page, and then the page a customer will see once they have completed a purchase. In between, Google Website Optimizer enables you to try out different headlines, images, sales text, whatever you choose, and then it tracks your success rate. It might be with a few simple changes your product sells a lot better, without you having to do anything more than a few tests and then let Google Website Optimizer do all the testing and analyzing for you.

I will be doing a lot of testing on an upcoming project that I am currently working on.

A small spoiler: Automatic deep link building with a Wordpress plugin. There will be both a free version and a subscription version that enables more features. Contact me if you want to know more before I launch the system to beta.

You can see the flash demo of Google Website Optimizer if you want to learn more about the system and how it can help you increase sales.

a

A little known tool - Google Website Optimizer

The plugin is very easy to install, and it immediately helps you to browse the site much easier.

The plugin is free, as most Wordpress plugins, and it will help all your users have a better experience if they browse your site via their iPhone.

I have been looking for a plugin for this for quite some time, and was thinking about putting one up myself, but that would have required a lot more research and time than I have at the moment.

Try browsing the site via your iPhone, and feel free to leave comments and observations on your experience, is there room for improvement? If so, where?

a

iPhone friendly version of tutorialvine.com

They have an interactive website builder which can be easily used simply via entering a little bit of data in a few easy steps.

They offer over 4000 ready made designs, and they offer you to get a homepage and access to all those designs for only $9.95 a month, including a free domain name.

The package also offer basic Website Promotion Tools (I wonder what that is?) but most importantly a risk free 30 day money back guarantee.

They have a design gallery of some of their available designs. Although they are not very outstanding by any web 2.0 standard (do we have that actually? Officially I mean?), the designs are very nice considering the price.

If you want to create a website but you have a low budget and just want to get started, this might be the best place for you to get started.

p.s. They do offer a test-drive, so you can get a glimpse behind, and see what you get for the price.

a

Have you seen BuildYourSite.com?

Basing your decision on experience on finding the best web hosting can be time consuming and frustrating, which is why its great independent sites such as Web Hosting Geeks provides web hosting reviews.

The reviews are by actual users, who can give an honest and real review on the web hosts. There are also “professional” reviews which are made available, but I prefer the reviews by the real users.

For people who are not certain of what exactly they are looking for, they can take a look at the web hosting articles featured on the site, which in detail explain various terms which might not make a lot of sense if you are new in the business. Are you looking for overseas hosting, or perhaps want to know exactly what the difference is between dedicated and shared hosting? Take a look at the articles section.

The design of the site is not amazing, but its efficient, and you get the feel it has been around for a long time, which brings credibility to the site. I would look into the site design if I were the site operator, but why fix something that works?

I would have liked to be able to find any kind of search function as well? A website without search? I wanted to check out another web host I use, Mediatemple, but I could find no such thing as a search-function. That was mildly irritating, but I got lost in the actual site as well and reading about other sites I’ve had hosting with or I have thought about using.

The footer boasts of more than 7000 articles, which should be enough to suit anyone looking for web hosting information.

On a sidenote: I’m glad to see that Bluehost is the best web host at the time of writing this review, which in fact is the hosting company for this very blog Good job Bluehost!

a

How to find quality web hosting

I was very happy the other day when I located a cool place for mac games. They have lots of cool games, such as neptune’s secret for mac and Jewel match for mac.

There are a few things that I am not that happy about, and that is the choice of design for the website. It looks… Well… Not very cool.

As a MAC user I’ve grown accustomed to sleek and funky design with nice usability and very easy navigation. This site fails in that aspect. They have some fun games though, so its worth going there to take a visit.

a

Excellent site for MAC games

Years ago when I started out it was a problem to even convince customers to get online, and even more to actually pay for the development costs.

For me it was always important to save costs on the development, and increase my overhead on small projects. One of the ways I did that, was to implement the use of web templates.

DreamTemplate
is just one out of many sites that offer that to their visitors. But that is where the comparison ends. They have a very excellent system where you get unlimited access to all their templates, but for a very fair yearly price, $59.95.

For that price you usually would not expect very much, but the price does cover instant access to more than 1000 well produced quality web templates, including full source files in html and the original Photoshop source files for additional tweaking.

Now, for me that would be more than enough, but the membership also includes access to over 15.000 different cliparts, 500 word templates, 8.000 TrueType fonts, and the list just goes on.

What more do you need? Click the link to the left (aff), take a look and sign up!

P.s. If I were to add something negative, its the music that automatically plays whenever you go to the frontpage. It only plays for a few seconds, but it is VERY annoying in my ears.

a

Finding good webtemplates

I’ve previously stated that the best SEO trick is to start up your homepage(s) and just wait. Don’t ignore it completely, but let it grow gradually instead of waiting to have the search engines index you and get some more traffic.

I’ve started a lot of homepages/sites in my effort to create a residual income on the internet, and my experience has taught me that I should not stress, and just let time do its work.

If you do the base work, and have relevant and interesting content, the rest will come automatically. Link building should obviously not be ignored, but just add a few links gradually, and you will succeed in the end

Getting just a single site to earn $5 a day is, as Courtney writes himself, a success! But having several blogs/sites that does that is even better. Each of my sites are not big earners, but all together they make a decent side-income, and every time I add a site to the portfolio, I know that it will in time add to the earnings.

The bonus with this tactic is that it also makes you less vulnerable. If you base 90% of your earnings on a single site, you are not really very secure. If that site losses its traffic for one reason or another, 90% will disappear. Spread your earnings across several sites, and you will be more secure.

a

Start several sites, not just one